In group images with outstanding folks, there are at all times a number of individuals who stand within the background, captured in the identical body as the good leaders, however who themselves stay unnamed and unknown. They’re acquainted solely to shut buddies or relations who proudly level to their image and point out their temporary reference to main movers of historical past.
N.S. Vinodh’s A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo: The Life and Occasions of Syud Hossain is the biography of 1 such individual – Syud Hossain (sure, that’s how he spelt his identify) – who, in his lifetime, was carefully related to Gandhiji, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah and Sarojini Naidu, and was additionally very briefly married to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, later ambassador to Russia, the US and the UK, and governor of Maharashtra.
And, sure, the guide has {a photograph} of Hossain on the 1919 Congress session in Amritsar with stalwarts of the day – Tilak, Motilal Nehru, Annie Besant and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya; one other with Kahlil Gibran from 1925, and nonetheless one other from 1938 with Subhash Chandra Bose and Sarojini Naidu. However, with out this biography, Hossain would have remained a thriller for many of us, even for religious college students of the liberty wrestle through which he was an energetic role-player, albeit within the UK and US.
Political journalist
Born in 1888 and having a nawabi background from each his dad and mom, with one aspect from Dhaka and the opposite from Calcutta, Hossain emerges as a good-looking, enticing, urbane, subtle and even a romantic determine, comfy on the highest ranges of Indian and Western society. In 1907, an early mentor described him as “among the finest students of English that the Calcutta College has produced”. He wrote frequently for The Statesman, which then had Benjamin Man Horniman (1873-1948) as its assistant editor. They established a lifelong friendship and went on to collaborate in selling the reason for India’s freedom by means of numerous newspapers.
N.S. Vinodh
A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo: The Life and Occasions of Syud Hossain
Simon and Schuster, 2021
After a brief stint in native authorities service, Hossain enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn, London, in 1910, and joined the Nationwide Liberal Membership the place he turned shut buddies with outstanding British liberals resembling H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and G.Ok. Chesterton. However these closest to him have been the poetess, Sarojini Naidu, and Asaf Ali, later India’s ambassador to the US, governor of Orissa and ambassador to Switzerland. Naidu, India’s “nightingale”, corresponded with Hossain from 1914 to 1947, along with her letters redolent with deep affection, embellished continuously along with her poems.
Hossain returned to India in November 1916 and rapidly started a profession as a political journalist on the Bombay Chronicle as deputy to Horniman. Right here, Hossain’s ardour for writing supported his ardour for India’s freedom. In Bombay, he got here near Gandhiji and, because the writer says, he turned “a life-long supporter of Gandhi and his philosophy”. Moreover being a author, Hossain was additionally a political activist as a member of the Congress and of Annie Besant’s House Rule League. Besant chosen him to go to London to plead for “House Rule” for India, however the journey was minimize brief at Gibraltar, the place Hossain was detained after which deported again to India.
In January 1919, Motilal Nehru recruited Hossain because the editor of his new newspaper, The Unbiased, to be revealed from Allahabad. As Hossain took cost of his new accountability, Gandhiji suggested him: “Might I additional hope that to a sturdy independence you’ll add an equal measure of self-restraint and the strictest adherence to fact?” Nice lesson for our instances, as effectively!
The 12 months 1919 was when the tough Rowlatt Act was enforced by the British authorities in Punjab, adopted by the Jallianwala Bagh bloodbath. Hossain’s paper emerged as a pointy critic of the federal government and have become so standard that it “had the most important circulation of any every day newspaper in Northern India” and “exceeded the mixed circulation of its most important opponents, The Pioneer, The Chief, and The Indian Every day Telegraph”.
An ill-fated love affair
This Allahabad stint produced an ill-fated romance that formed Hossain’s subsequent profession and presumably erased him completely from the annals of Indian historical past. Motilal’s daughter, then 19-year previous Sarup Kumari (later Vijayalakshmi Pandit) and Hossain, 12 years her senior, fell in love, eloped and bought married as per Muslim rites.
Below mixed stress from Motilal and Gandhiji, the couple was pressured to annul their marriage. The truth is, Gandhiji personally admonished the couple. Hossain, already scheduled to go away for London to plead the reason for the Khilafat motion, was hurriedly despatched off to the UK, whereas Sarup Kumari was despatched to Sabarmati ashram for six months “to purify her thoughts and soul”.
The writer has quoted two pleasant letters through which Sarup has spoken about her experiences on the ashram. She describes it as “so totally drab and so unpleasing” – waking up at 4 am, cleansing out the dwelling quarters, washing within the river, whereas the menu was resembling to “to kill one’s want for meals”.
Later, on her return dwelling, Sarup gave her good friend Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini Naidu’s daughter, an irreverent account about how Gandhiji personally chastised her for her behaviour and defined how she ought to have carried out herself. The younger love-lorn woman concludes: “However then, if I began telling you the great Mahatmaji’s objections I ought to fill just a few hundred pages.”
Hossain left for the UK in 1920 and didn’t return to India until 1946. His complete position in the reason for India’s freedom was performed out in Britain and later within the US. Thus, he missed out on all the numerous occasions that formed India’s future – the non-cooperation motion, the rise of the Muslim League and the agitation for Pakistan led by his previous good friend, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Give up India Motion, the interim authorities headed by Nehru, and eventually independence, accompanied, heartbreakingly for Hossain, by the partition of the nation on communal foundation.
The writer supplies over 200 pages the main points of Hossain’s energetic position within the nationwide trigger as a journalist and speaker. He was editor of the nationalist paper, India, in London for some time. Hossain then left London in October 1921 to start out a contemporary profession in america. The writer describes the uncertainty surrounding his new circumstances thus: “A pungent pen, a pugnacious eloquence, a cussed patriotism, and an admiration for Gandhi had been his life’s anchors. As he anxious about his future, an icy blast from the ocean added to his trepidation … and his melancholy.”
Combating India’s trigger overseas
Hossain was within the US from 1921 to 1946. Initially, for 2 years he wrote extensively and gave lectures throughout the US on India’s claims for freedom. The organisers of his lecture excursions described him as a “disciple of Gandhi” and as being “full of fireside and magnetism and a supply that’s as melodious as convincing”. A newspaper mentioned Hossain “seemed like Rodolf Valentino, sensitized, intellectualized and simply as youthful despite his lengthy years earlier than the general public”.
Then, in 1924-28, he was the editor of The New Orient that sought to harmonise the cultures of the East and West. The problems he edited had contributions from Gandhiji, Einstein, Horniman, Kahlil Gibran, Bertrand Russell, HG Wells, Sarojini Naidu and CF Andrews. His subsequent profession transfer was to present lectures at summer time periods of the College of Southern California on Indian and Islamic civilisations in 1934-43. The college e-newsletter described these lectures as “among the many hottest” and “anticipated to have a big enrolment”.
After this, until 1946, Hossain was immediately concerned with selling the reason for India’s freedom as the pinnacle of the Washington-based “Nationwide Committee for Indian Independence” (NCIF). Right here he was each an activist and a journalist: he edited the Voice of India, described within the guide as “probably the most influential journal of the Indian nationalists within the years resulting in Indian independence”.
His huge contacts in India and the US ensured that the paper obtained contributions from Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad, Vijayalakshmi Pandit and several other American dignitaries. Hossain’s place with the NCIF additionally enabled him to escort Vijayalakshmi Pandit when she got here to the US in 1945-46 on a year-long talking tour.
Unrequited love
At this level, Hossain felt the necessity to return to India. He wrote to Nehru for recommendation however bought a lukewarm reply: Nehru referred to Hossain’s lengthy stint overseas and quoted Gandhiji as recommending that “you are able to do extra essential work in America”. The writer has quoted M.O. Mathai, Nehru’s secretary, as saying that Gandhiji’s “shrewd recommendation” was to forestall the revival of gossip mills “impairing Vijaya Lakshmi’s usefulness”. The love affair of almost 30 years in the past had clearly not been forgotten by both Gandhiji or Nehru!
Hossain bought again to India regardless of the misgivings of India’s stalwarts, however this was a bitter homecoming. Hossain had little understanding of how a lot India had modified. Quickly after he reached Delhi, he known as his previous good friend Jinnah, solely to be rebuked as a member of the “enemy camp”. Jinnah seems to have apologised later, stopping Hossain from sending the letter he had drafted through which he had advised his good friend “that even if you grow to be President of Pakistan, I hope you’ll keep in mind to be a gentleman”. An in depth good friend mentioned of Hossain after his dying that he was “a little bit of a misfit in post-1921 India”.
Hossain was nominated as free India’s first ambassador to Egypt, the place he hosted each Nehru and Vijayalakshmi Pandit. He occupied this publish for only a 12 months, and died in February 1949. He was buried in Cairo’s “Metropolis of the Lifeless”, with its 1000’s of tombs and residential to half 1,000,000 residents. A wonderful tomb has been erected for the departed author, orator, activist and diplomat by the Indian authorities. The writer studies that in later years, Vijayalakshmi Pandit would cease periodically in Cairo and “spend just a few hours on the tomb”.
That is the story of a footnote in India’s freedom wrestle that has been given breath and life by a wonderful author. The writer, N.S. Vinodh, has been a pupil of engineering and administration, has been profitable in actual property and company finance, and took early retirement to run his personal small firm and, uncommon amongst company honchos, opted to pursue his love of historical past and journey. This guide is each a labour of affection and an impressive piece of painstaking analysis – a mirrored image of the writer’s huge journey, his dedication to the guide undertaking, his dogged pursuit of supply materials, his readability of thought, and, above all, his lucid fashion.
The guide is a helpful reminder that each one leaders within the forefront of the liberty wrestle had devoted supporters who contributed to the nationwide trigger fearlessly and with whole dedication – however usually anonymously. It’s a pleasure when their tales are delivered to public consideration.
A piquant thought: if Hossain had not been in exile all through the liberty wrestle, along with his charisma and dedication to the nationwide trigger, his writing abilities and oratory, and his buddies on the highest ranges, might he not have been on the high echelons of the motion, robustly serving the reason for united India in opposition to the likes of Jinnah and Liaquat Ali?
Might I finish on a private be aware? About 40 years in the past, I held the modest publish of Below Secretary (Property) within the Ministry of Exterior Affairs, being chargeable for the hire, buy, building and restore of our properties overseas. As soon as I obtained a request from our embassy in Cairo for funds to restore the tomb of our first ambassador, Syud Hossain. I recall I might get the often tight-fisted “Finance” to approve the cash required. On this guide, the writer has complained that the tomb is in poor situation. Maybe, the embassy in Cairo might make the same proposal to my present-day successor!
Talmiz Ahmad, a former diplomat, holds the Ram Sathe Chair for Worldwide Research, Symbiosis Worldwide College, Pune, and is Consulting Editor, The Wire.